4 out of 5

Label: Cooking Vinyl

Produced by: John Morand

While this was borne out of typical Cracker anti-“The Man” dealings – but I give them points for being pretty brilliant about it – the concept of Greatest Hits Redux is simply a brilliant one, at least for any multiple-generation enduring, stylistically shifting band like Cracker, and I’d love to hear them do another run at this X years on.

The gist is this: pissed that their former label would be putting out a greatest hits record without their consent, Cracker re-recorded the material anew and released it the same effing day, and for cheaper. …And beat the major label sales. Petty but brilliant.

As David Lowery and Johnny Hickman and crew have matured and the band has grown and shrank and grown and sprung a newly formed Camper Van Beethoven limb since those first days, it should be obvious that their take on their classics would “mature” as well. This has been documented in a couple ways already, with the folk Leftover Salmon mash-up album, or the live disc included in the 2-CD version of Garage D’Or (aside from if you’ve caught the band live y’self, of course), but getting studio takes on the original cuts is something special.

That maturity can cut two ways, though, as there’s arguably something special to what / how the band was at the time of the first recordings: the Americana-worshipping post-hippies of their debut; the scenester flirtations of Kerosene Hat; the malaise of Gentleman’s Blues. One’s reaction to the updates will of course vary, but I think self-titled benefits from the somewhat looser, more assured playing style of these adults, while Kerosene Hat’s Get Off This feels a little less relevant in its revision. Tracks from the somewhat forced Golden Age get a nice revisionist history that ditches some of its cringe single-baiting nature, but Blues’ single offering lacks the humbleness of the prior take. Thereafter, we get into relatively modern material (from the time), so it’s closer to home; or sometimes it’s exactly what you’d hear later – the single new track was put onto Greenland shortly after. (It seems worth noting that Forever was skipped, and I don’t really know who was asking for the embarrassing Ain’t Gonna Suck Itself, but I guess that’s thematically fitting…)

There are a lot of lovely flourishes to the recording: extra guitar work, some altered verses. That’s part of the fun, and also part of the aforementioned maturity, and also part of the above caveats: these flourishes make sense now, but wouldn’t have then. John Morand’s recording is quite perfect throughout, though, adding a richness and in-the-room rawness that’s great for these tracks. This isn’t exactly the set to get for a new listener (alas, that probably is a “proper” greatest hits, but you could use the approved Garage D’Or for that), but for Cracker’s dedicated base, this is such a fun concept, and the fun extends to the debates we can have about which versions are best.

The liner notes have typical Lowery / Cracker snark, and are very entertaining. Although, yeah, I wish all the various questions repurposed as those notes (perhaps posted on a Cracker board somewheres and reprinted here?) had answers!